The Food and Drug Administration is urging meat producers to limit the amount of antibiotics they give animals in response to public health concerns about the drugs.

That advice would have been obvious and overdue if issued twenty years ago. And notice that they’re asking rather than telling.

What the FDA should do is to ban the practice of routinely feeding antibiotics to healthy animals. And the agency should also make the most potent and medically crucial families of antibiotics illegal for use on farmed animals.

You could absolutely have a thriving, profitable meat and dairy industry with these rules in place. The cost of animal products would go up a bit, that’s all.

But the FDA doesn’t want to step on any toes by taking meaningful action: factory farming and pharmaceutical profits outweigh public health concerns. As usual. Link.